Ask someone of Greek ancestry to recommend a place to go for a good bowl of Avgolemono–that’s egg lemon soup, the restorative dish that does for Greeks what chicken soup does for other ethnic groups–and they’ll tell you, “stay home.”
Having grown up with egg lemon soup at family gatherings and at the merest hint of a cold, these people will insist that the proportion of broth to rice and the sharpness of the note of lemon be just the way mom, or before her, Yia Yia (grandma) used to do it.
Although it is a soup of very few ingredients, not many restaurants get it right. Bad experiences range from thin and bland to almost pudding-like. One common sin–the addition of a thickening agent.
One restaurant version that gets a nod for coming close to homemade is at the Rosewood Restaurant (9421 W. Higgins Rd., Rosemont; 847-696-9494). The restaurant gets a lot of after-funeral business from not-far-away Elmwood Cemetery, a favorite resting place for Chicago’s Greek community. If the Avgolemono wasn’t pretty good, customers would not be shy in saying so.
A cup of the not too thick nor too thin, not too lemony or too bland soup comes with lunch or is a la carte on the dinner menu at $6.95. It isn’t available every day, but is always on the stove when a Greek funeral gathering is booked.
Though there are soup ups and downs along the city’s Greektown restaurant strip, a particularly good version is at Artopolis Bakery, Cafe and Agora (306 S. Halsted St.; 312-559-9000). Chicken chunks show up in this version and an excellent addition is a choose-it-yourself hunk of fresh, crusty bread from the bakery side of the operation. The soup comes in a bowl that is the blue of the Aegean Sea. It’s $2.95.
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Despite its location, Artopolis is, in its menu selections, not just Greek but Mediterranean. At a recent noontime visit, further evidence of that was in the piped-in music, the Italo-American songs of Louis Prima from a 1950s-era album.
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Avgolemono
What it is: Egg lemon soup
What it costs: $2.95-$6.95